IBM Begins Integration of Identity Resolution Technology

For the banking industry, the technology of identity resolution can help to unravel the nasty effects of a long history of mergers and acquisitions.

Now that IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) has acquired SRD (Las Vegas), a privately-held analytics firm that makes "identity resolution" software, the company's next step is to find ways to apply the technology throughout its footprint.

Identity resolution software uses a combination of public records and proprietary techniques to verify customers' personal information, to create a normalized view of an organization's customers, and then to make sure that the data is stored in a format amenable to rapid and accurate searching.

SRD's operations will be integrated into IBM's Information Management software group, which will make SRD's products available immediately. IBM withheld financial terms of the deal.

John Slitz, formerly CEO of SRD, is now vice president of entity resolution solutions at IBM. He will report to Janet Perna, IBM's general manager of information management software. His first task is to help determine how identity resolution can have the greatest impact when combined with other technologies across IBM's technology portfolio and partner network. Then, Slitz plans to introduce the resulting innovations into the marketplace with the help of business consultants within IBM Global Services.

For the banking industry, the technology of identity resolution can help to unravel the nasty effects of a long history of mergers and acquisitions. "Our ability to do on-demand entity resolution results in orders-of-magnitude cleaner data about personal information, the ability to relate people together, and the ability to protect privacy in unique ways," remarks Slitz. "It helps [banks] with their CRM issues, it helps them with their AML [anti-money laundering] issues, and it plain helps them with their marketing issues."

Clean, verified and searchable customer data can provide great value to decision-makers within banks. "It helps to know that these are [actual] people, and that these are all the ways in which the people are using a financial institution," notes Slitz. "New products will develop from that."

"This has vast ramifications for the banking industry, for insurance, for healthcare, and certainly across wide ranges of governmental services," Slitz adds.